Aaron Marcus explains why actors shouldn't blindly follow character notes in audition sides. He argues you have creative control over your interpretation unless a casting director asks for a specific change. Marcus shares an NBC audition where he ignored the written sadness note and played the character matter-of-fact instead, then adjusted after getting a callback note from the director.
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In this video, I'm going to be sharing with you how to understand the best way to handle audition notes. If you watch this video to the end, you're going to get a link to another really helpful video, What You Should Never Wear to an Audition. Okay, let's get started. Hi, I'm Aaron Marcus, and welcome to the Acting and Modeling Quick Tips channel and the Actor Career Center. Look, we get audition notes all the time. You get the sides to a film or TV show, and they might have things in there that the writers put in, like laughing at this point, or they might say crying, or they might say screaming. And it's always— it's complicated to know, are these people telling me that I should be doing this? And Let me tell you how this whole thing got started. I was talking to a friend and she was telling me she went to an audition recently and the character in the notes, it said screaming at one point. And she said, you know, all these people were screaming but she didn't, and she was wondering if she just really messed up and she should— And I explained to her, look, when you're talking about notes, that's, that's a description from a writer. We are actors, and as an actor, we make final decisions, at least for the audition, as to what we want to do. And, and I'm not saying if you get a note from a casting director, you know, asking for something, of course you're going to Oblige and do what they're asking. But for the initial audition, that's one of the beautiful parts about auditioning. We get a chance to play. We get a chance to come up with our own ideas as to what we think our character should be doing. And so whenever I see notes, I look at them, I'll read them, but if it doesn't feel right to me, it doesn't make sense to me, I'm not, I'm not following it. And that's, that's just the honest truth. And hopefully I'm not offending any, any writers here. But let me give you a real example, and I always like giving real examples whenever I'm discussing things in videos. So there was an audition I had many, many years ago for an NBC show, and somebody Who I knew died. I was the executive director of a country club, and one of my members died at the country club, and I'm being interviewed by the detectives. So normally you would think, well, this guy's going to be sad. He's talking about the members, how horrible it is, and, and, you know, it's the family. It's just crushing for them. Well, I decided not to do that. I wasn't sad. Yeah, I mean, look, as a human being, yeah, I was a little bit sad there, but as the money person for this country club, honestly, my character, he was concerned about losing income for the country club. He was concerned if people were finding out about people getting murdered at the country club, they might quit. Other people, it might be harder for them to join. So as I was being interviewed and talking about this member, Instead of talking about it in a very solemn and sad way, it was more matter-of-fact. Yeah, it's horrible, essentially. Hey, anything else? I got a lot of work to do here because there are a lot of problems that are going on with my country club. And the crazy thing was, when I had a callback, I did get a note, and I'll never forget, the director did say to me, You know, you were the only one who took this character in, in that direction. Do me a favor, would you read it again but maybe have a little bit of, of, of blood throwing— flowing through your veins and not just ice? And I heard he was saying maybe I took it a little bit too far, and I backed it off. Now, I still wasn't showing this immense sadness. It was still matter-of-fact, but I backed it off a little bit, and I did wind up working on the show. So when you do see notes in there, yes, yes, you want to read them, but it's, it's like you were just given a mound of clay and it's up to you to decide how you want to put this together, how, how you want to do this creatively. So you make the final call. The other thing I wanted to mention If by any chance you have ever experienced anything with, you know, audition notes, you know, written into the sides, please share it with us so that way we can learn from you as well. And don't forget, you know, share, share this link with fellow actors so we can all learn from each other and continue to build a great channel. If you haven't done this yet, please subscribe to the channel, click the notification bell so you always know when a new video has been uploaded. If you like it, give it a thumbs up. That is helpful. And I did promise I was going to share the link to the video, What You Should Never Wear to an Audition. You might be surprised. But anyhow, I hope you enjoy it. And I'm Aaron Marcus and can't wait to talk with you again soon. See ya. See ya.
